Anyone who has flown commercially in recent years has doubtless had the experience of lifting his or her luggage off of a conveyor belt of the type used by all airlines for transporting hand luggage from a location where it was off loaded from a baggage truck used to convey luggage from an arriving aircraft, to the luggage delivery room of the airport, where the travelers are waiting to reclaim their luggage.
In most instances, the conveyor belt is not a belt at all, but rather a series of separately supported, carefully contoured metal plates joined together in an articulated manner so as to permit the luggage-conveying device to make many turns as it snakes through the luggage delivery room.
Although a number of the prior art luggage delivering devices have been relatively successful, many of such devices have suffered the disadvantage of failing to have noise-free operation in public areas.
It was in an effort to provide a conveyor having particularly quiet operation as well as requiring less input power, reduced installation time and lower per-foot cost that the present invention was evolved.